INTP

I took the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator test 20 years ago, and just recently took an extremely abbreviated version on Facebook. The original test said I was of type INTP, and even the FB version came up with the same result. You can Google info on the Myers-Briggs easier than I can explain it all here. I could tell you what the letters stand for. For instance, I am an "I" as opposed to an "E", which stand for introversion and extraversion (yes, that is how it is spelled) respectively, and this is self-explanatory. But the other six possible letters are for words we're all familiar with ("N" is for intuition) but they have more specialized meanings when used with the M-B test. So if you are interested, look it up.

Because of the ADHD thing, I'm rather curious about what in my past was affected by that condition as opposed to what was affected by my personality type. INTP is what I am, but ADHD is a mask that obscures it, just as it obscures IQ, just as bifocals obscure my pretty blue eyes.

I was initially skeptical of the test, but when I took it, I found that it reflected my personality very well, to the point of being "spooky." One thing it got right was that my scores on the I-E dimension were rather low on the I-side. In real life that translates to a tendency to be introverted, but I'm far from being a classic introvert. I like my alone time, but I still need to be an extrovert sometimes.

On FB it said that both Isaac Newton and Einstein would have been INTPs. That's pretty good company. In the packet of "stuff" that came with my test results, it says that my type is "the most intellectually profound of all the types." I don't want to argue with that. It says that my type makes up about 1% of the general population, but I've seen elsewhere that it is like 3% in the US. It also says that I'm likely to have a well-developed imagination. Since I write science fiction I think it got that right, too.

There is a long list of "Characteristics to be aware of" and it was in reading this list that I recognized myself most certainly. I close this post with some of these. The first one is that "your type is often misunderstood," so with that in mind, I leave you with a few of the ones I think are the most valuable for my friends and acquaintances to know about me.

1) I have a strong desire to understand my universe, and I hate redundancy and incoherence.

2) I would rather analyze the world than run it.

3) I am not easily impressed with authority of any kind.

4) I tend to organize concepts and ideas but not people or situations unless it is an absolute necessity.

5) I'm often so concerned with the exact and precise truth that I make the explanation too complicated to follow.

6) I prefer to work quietly, without interruption, and often alone.

These final two go hand-in-hand and are probably the most important to keep in mind about me:

7) I am compliant and easy to live with.

8) I am quite flexible and adaptable until one of my ruling principles is violated. At that point, I stop adapting.

The kind of trouble these last two characteristics taken together have caused me is worth a post of its own.